Book review: Stephen King revisits the kid from The Shining’

In his author’s note, Stephen King remembers a guy who asked him, “Hey, any idea what happened to the kid from ‘The Shining’?” That began to smolder within his imagination. Danny Torrance. The boy attacked...

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By
Sam Coale
Posted Sep. 29, 2013 @ 12:01 am

In his author’s note, Stephen King remembers a guy who asked him, “Hey, any idea what happened to the kid from ‘The Shining’?” That began to smolder within his imagination. Danny Torrance. The boy attacked by his father who slowly went crazy, stranded in the blizzard-enclosed Overlook Hotel with its ghosts and ghouls. King hated Stanley Kubrick’s film of the 1977 book, then admits, “The man who wrote ‘Doctor Sleep’ is very different from the well-meaning alcoholic who wrote ‘The Shining.’”

In this suspenseful, insidiously frightening and meticulously detailed sequel, Dan Torrance is grown up and an alcoholic like his father. He’s managed to shove the Overlook horrors into lockboxes in his mind, as recommended by Dick Hallorann, the Overlook chef, who like Danny can shine — part telepathy, part psychic predictions and part body-changing, in that you can move into and inhabit another’s body.

After waking up drunk with a woman he picked up in a bar, Danny finds remnants of cocaine in her shabby apartment and her bruised 18-month-old son. He steals her money and winds up in Frazer, N.H., where a friendly soul sets him up to work in Teenytown, the local amusement park with its tiny train. He’s later sponsored by a local guy to join AA. King’s own recovery matches Danny’s own, the procedures and protocols of the day-by-day recovery, always tenuous, wracked by the fear that he’ll start drinking again. Danny gets a job at the local hospice and holds hands with the dying, who call him “Doctor Sleep.”

Abra Rafaella Stone is born in Anniston, N.H., nearby, and as a baby, screams for hours with, as we learn, premonitions of 9/11. At a later birthday, she gets spoons to levitate to the ceiling. Her shining power is immense, and slowly over the years she connects with Danny.

Meanwhile, riding around the country in their RVs is a group known as the True Knot, a vampire-like crew who kill kids to suck up their essence, which they call “steam.” With the steam they can live indefinitely. They kill Bradley Trevor, who, unknown to them, may be infected with something. Abra sees his photo as a missing child in a local newspaper and begins to shine, discovering Rose the Hat, the leader of the Knot. It’s only a matter of time before Abra and Rose will meet to have it out, with Danny as a kind of go-between.

King craftily tightens the noose of his plot. His prose is now leaner without the coarse rage that used to short-circuit it, grossing out readers with bodily fluids and such. Some surly vulgarity still surfaces, but the story carries the style with such precision, inevitability and sudden violence that the reader’s mesmerized and terrified until the final harrowing moments in a tale that’s easily one of King’s best.